There is a great deal of excitement in our house about the impending improvements to the intersection near Hephzibah Baptist Church that brings together Wendell Boulevard, Battle Bridge Road and N.C. 97.

The morning commute to Wendell Middle School isn’t so bad until we turn around to come home.

If we fail to turn right out of the school onto N.C. 97 and travel through Lizard Lick, we are destined to an interminable wait as we try to cut across west-bound traffic on Wendell Boulevard as those motorists head toward another day at the office.

The stop light for motorists in the right lane traveling east on Wendell Boulevard – the lane that takes you into Wendell proper – is marked by a stoplight that hasn’t been anything other than green in the 25 or so years I’ve been driving.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered why the Department of Transportation doesn’t simply remove that light and put it somewhere it’s needed.

Engineers say they won’t be able to fix the intersection completely, but it is hard to imagine anything much worse.

I hope the powers-that-be move toward construction with laser-like speed.

The news about improvements to that intersection came about the same time I had a conversation with Clyde

Holt, who is Knightdale’s town attorney.

He mentioned the speed with which motorists can now reach downtown Raleigh thanks to the Knightdale Bypass.

Clyde suggested that, perhaps more than any other DOT project, the Knightdale Bypass had improved life not only for the people of eastern Wake County, but for people all over eastern North Carolina.

Clyde’s words were still echoing in my head last weekend when I visited with my brother. Lee now lives in

Blowing Rock, but our families attended a family gathering at Cape Hatteras, giving Lee an opportunity to use the new road himself.

“It’s slick,” he said. Indeed, it is slick.

Clyde pointed out that regionalism helped get that road built after mayors from all over Wake County recommended it for a new kind of bidding process the state wanted to try out.

The design-build process, as it’s called, allowed bids to be awarded much more quickly and workers were able to get on the job and finish faster.

That same kind of regionalism may prove beneficial for eastern Wake County again soon, as the demand for mass transit grows louder in the shadow of expensive gasoline.

Regional transportation officials are talking about bus service for eastern Wake County that, just a few years ago, would have been laughable.

Town leaders from Wendell, Zebulon and Knightdale are all behind the project and, in the wake of new bus services extended to Wake Forest in northern Wake County, it seems likely the service will be here in the not-too-distant future.

No matter what form the newest transportation improvement takes – new roads, new intersections, new services – it’s likely we will all be looking for ways to get from Point A to Point B faster and for less money.

Now, if we could just get the traffic engineers to unstick that green light at NC 97 and Wendell Boulevard.